Rising Tides
Climate Refugees in the Twenty-First Century
- 2017 INDIES Finalist
- Finalist, Ecology & Environment (Adult Nonfiction)
This chilling and urgent call to action spares no detail in its mission to present the facts on a looming humanitarian disaster.
Climate-change warning messages too often focus on the environment without going into specifics of how humans will be hurt by global warming. Rising Tides single-handedly rectifies this issue. Meticulously researched and data oriented, it assigns concrete numbers and provable facts to an issue that policy makers should be more worried about: mass migration as a result of climate change. Exhaustively, the book covers migration as a result of farming failure, resource wars, water availability shifts, desertification, and immediate disasters, all the while factoring geopolitical, cultural, political, and environmental factors together. Thanks to an equal reliance on current events and models, as well as the authors’ thorough understanding of geopolitics, the case is beyond convincing.
This is a book that seems to have been specifically written for the international policy maker, and indeed, this demographic should consider it essential, even critical, reading. However, local and national politicians should not ignore it; Rising Tides dedicates a great deal of space to the phenomenon of internally displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Dust Bowl.
Tonewise, Rising Tides is unremittingly intense. Its focus is on human suffering, emphasized by numbers but driven home by strong, active language, descriptions of the conditions of refugee life, and unabashed calls to action on the part of the international community. The fact that it is a passionate book does not at all injure it as a resource. On the contrary, the text comes across as extremely earnest, a good combination with the expertise of its research. Rising Tides is undoubtedly an alarm, but thanks to its thoroughness and currency, it reads as an important wake-up call.
Reviewed by
Anna Call
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
